Having the privilege of working with 100+ startups in the 7 years at NuBinary, one thing I’ve seen time and again is that many founders don’t realize manual work is an essential part of any company at any stage. You can’t ever automate 100% of your operations, even in a pure SaaS company: that's called "customer support." Sure, customer support and other processes are becoming more automated with AI, but anyone who's been in B2B enterprise SaaS knows full automation is impossible. You always need a human touch to support clients — not just for quality but for building relationships.
Here’s a fact: the smaller the startup, the more manual work you need to do. And smart investors like it that way! They see it as a wise use of their investment because automation is a long-term investment. In the early days, you want to avoid unnecessary investments. You should spend money on customer acquisition, not process automation. Most of your "product" could actually be a set of manual processes. For example, if your startup is building a marketplace and needs to handle monthly payouts to vendors, you could spend weeks building an automated solution, or handle payouts manually and launch weeks earlier! Do all the calculations in an Excel sheet and pay them one by one through your bank until scaling makes automation necessary.
Worried about scaling beyond 100s of vendors? That’s a good problem to have and positions you well in front of investors. This approach helps you launch sooner, validate your idea faster, and invest less upfront. You’ll make fundraising easier by showing traction without heavy tech investment, pivot faster when needed, and demonstrate to investors that you’re adopting a true lean startup mindset rather than building tech for tech’s sake.
At NuBinary, we help startups implement the Lean Startup Methodology every day. I haven't yet found a single startup that couldn't save tons of money by applying these principles. This mindset can apply to many — even all — aspects of a product. You can sometimes launch in a day using tools like dashboard builders or our real-code platform Codalio. Curious about how this could work for your startup? Reach out — I’d love to be challenged on how to apply lean startup concepts to your unique situation
Contact us at info@nubinary.com for more information or book a meeting to meet with our CTOs here.